Managing Creative People: Lessons in Leadership for the Ideas Economy

Chapter 15. The road to Exit Five

... organisations are political systems in which the politicians win.

—John W. Hunt, Managing People at Work

We have learned that you can't bully creativity into being. It cannot be coerced by finance people or bureaucratic efficiency or even state-of-the-art market research. And because creativity is so hard to come by, many agencies base their success on other skills. For example, maintaining good personal rapport with the client. But, eventually, you can't cover a shortfall of imagination.

—Phil Dusenberry, BBDO

Crafts are reactionary. Creativity is revolutionary. Crafts are inherently conservative. Creativity is inherently subversive. Crafts reinforce existing cultural values. Creativity undermines them. Crafts help to bond clans and communities together by reaffirming, in paints or pots or poetry, the traditions that unite them as a group. Creativity is iconoclastic: it disrupts the conventions of community in pursuit of a personal vision, a universal truth, or both.

The Ndebele people of Kwa-Ndebele, a region of South Africa north of Pretoria, are famous for painting their mud huts with arresting geometric patterns in a vibrant range of colours. The effect can be stunning, especially in the winter when the transparent light of the Transvaal etches these radiant hieroglyphs on a background of dun, dry veld. The aesthetic is purely abstract; the motifs are drawn from traditional Ndebele designs as well as from stylized versions of contemporary objects ...